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Legendary 747 Designer Joe Sutter Dies Age 95 (stuff.co.nz)
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes: Joe Sutter, Boeing's lead designer for the design and construction of the 747, has passed away at 95. This documentary of the 747 and Joe Sutter is excellent: Jumbo Revolution.
Sutter and his engineers "initially played second fiddle to the more glamorous Boeing development project at the time, the Supersonic Transport (SST)," according to Stuff.co.nz. "But the US government ultimately killed funding for the SST, and the 747 turned into the icon of international long-haul flying that established Boeing's supremacy in commercial aviation for more than two decades after it entered service in January 1970."
Sutter's team completed the roll-out of the 747 in just 29 months -- a record -- and in 1986 Sutter also served on the team investigating the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. "Appalled that NASA's safety standards were lower than those in his commercial airplane world, Sutter was typically vocal in his criticism and pushed a key recommendation of the committee to implement a new safety management system."
Sutter and his engineers "initially played second fiddle to the more glamorous Boeing development project at the time, the Supersonic Transport (SST)," according to Stuff.co.nz. "But the US government ultimately killed funding for the SST, and the 747 turned into the icon of international long-haul flying that established Boeing's supremacy in commercial aviation for more than two decades after it entered service in January 1970."
Sutter's team completed the roll-out of the 747 in just 29 months -- a record -- and in 1986 Sutter also served on the team investigating the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. "Appalled that NASA's safety standards were lower than those in his commercial airplane world, Sutter was typically vocal in his criticism and pushed a key recommendation of the committee to implement a new safety management system."
Sutter's team completed the roll-out of the 747 in just 29 months -- a record
They barely missed it. Actually 33 1/3 months would have been a record.
First off 747s are still flying.
Second, my dad was a lead engineer at boeing, and for the 747 he designed the fuel system. It takes a huge team just to design the fuel system. No one person understand the entire plane. No one person could even keep track of all the bolts holes. Building something at that scale is simply a staggering undertaking. Especially when you consider my dad didn't even know how to use a computer. But he had the whole fuel system figured out in his head. And that's probably as much as any one human can bite off on something like this.
Because of that I've always been in awe of professional engineers and boeing in particular. While I might acheieve really cool basic science discoveries as a PI and even lead modest teams of scientists, Nothing I do really works as well as a boeing plane and is not even close to the complexity.
These folks have figured out rules of interaction that let you manage complexity and make sure it all works as a system. Boeing in particular also figured out how to learn from mistakes. It's easy to learn from mistakes if you are one person. But a corprorate culture has to almost grow a new organ to institutionalize a way of not repeating mistakes. In the organizations I'm used to working it this slowly becomes a hell of regulations imposed on individuals that basically prevent work. But at boeing they figured this out somehow so that they still can produce airplanes.
It's really a remarkable social entitity.
So as software engineers you have a lot you owe to the engineers that went before you and invented all the things you take as endemic to software engineering (e.g. requirements documents, unit tests, etc...). Those were all invented long before computers. There's a reason why the masons who build cathedrals where organized into hierachical guilds. It's because you had to create an entitiy to manage the complexity of building lofty arches back then.
it's not all just the skill of one man. The amazing part is it's a skill of teams so large most people don't know each other.
During the 747 development, it was found that the wings would oscillate up and down and with a twisting motion, a condition which if allowed to continue and amplify would destroy the airplane.
Some engineers wanted to redo the whole wing.
Sutter's solution was to permanently twist the wing from root to wingtip. It worked, and took much less cash and time than a redesign. Google for "Sutter Twist"
When the 747-8 was designed with the 787-inspired wing, the same problem showed up again. This time, it was cured in the software.
Funny, I saw a documentary on the building of the original 747 just a few days before he died. I knew he was the project manager but didn't know he cured the wing issue with such a simple fix.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
They didn't set out to make a partial upper deck. The original plan was to make it a full double-decker like Airbus eventually did with the A380. But given their deadline, they didn't think they could solve the problem of adding (safe) evacuation slides for passengers on the upper deck in time, so they settled for a traditional single-decker (which they already had experience designing, just needed to scale everything up to make it wider). The short blister on top for the cockpit was added to allow the cargo variant to have a swing nose so you could load cargo through the front, instead of through the side. So it's not really "copying" someone else's design when there's only one practical solution (the impractical one being putting the cockpit in the swing-away nose and designing all sorts of latches for the mechanical linkages between the cockpit controls to the plane's control surfaces).
This is why the upper deck on the early 747-100 is a lot shorter than in later variants like the 747-400. The few upper-deck seats on the 747-100 were an afterthought, added more for novelty than for increased passenger capacity. The lower deck on the 747 already carried nearly 3x as many passengers as any other plane operating at the time. Boeing tried for decades to sell the idea of a full double-deck 747 to the airlines, but not enough of them would commit to them. So Boeing never bothered making it. When Airbus announced their plans for the A380, Boeing tried again to pitch a full double-deck 747, and again not enough airlines said they wanted it. That's why they didn't try to compete with Airbus on the A380.
Production of the A380 will probably soon cease, and its sales have just barely recouped its design costs. The 4-engine airliners like the 747, A340, and A380 are being eaten alive in the market by twin-engine airliners like the 777, 787, and A350 (2 engines are more efficient than 4). The disparity between A380 orders and deliveries is mostly due to airlines which placed orders but have asked to delay delivery or have refused receipt as they consider cancelling. Airbus needs to produce about 20-25 a year for the production facilities alone (i.e. excluding design costs) to operate without losing money. And right now they're scheduled to drop to 12 deliveries/year in 2018, so they'll probably wind up losing money on the A380 overall (the remaining 100 or so orders will probably be delivered at a loss, if they're not canceled outright). So it would appear Boeing's market analysis was correct that there wasn't enough market demand for a full double-deck airliner. It's a good thing the EU government guaranteed the loans Airbus took out to design the plane or this might've bankrupted the company. Competition between Airbus and Boeing is what keeps technology progressing and prices low.
in 1986 Sutter also served on the team investigating the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. "Appalled that NASA's safety standards were lower than those in his commercial airplane world...
Not to be a pessimist here, but I imagine NASA astronauts sign onto the program with a possibility of death being part of contract. They are dealing with some of the outer limits of our current science and technology in the name of exploration. It's a slightly different thing than a family climbing onto a jumbo jet for a cross-country trip to visit grandma. There a lot more angry surviving family with lawyers in the latter.
Korean Airlines has 3 unfortunate events involving the 747 KAL 007, KAL 801, and KAL 902. Two of those were shootdowns by the Soviet Union!
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
the upper deck on the early 747-100 is a lot shorter than in later variants like the 747-400
There's an even shorter version that was made for long range flights:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747SP
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?